Using Technology in Course Planning

The Teaching and Technology Fellowship really allowed me to think about how I want to teach for the upcoming year.  Because the school year for the courses I teach ended during the Fellowship, I focused myself on planning for the next school year. 

As some background information, I teach at a Reform synagogue, a Pre-Confirmation class made up of 7th, 8th and 9th grade students.  The structure of the curriculum is flexible and as a faculty we look for opportunities to engage students in Jewish Learning that interests them.

Teaching two courses each year allowed me to consider many different methods.  The first course I planned out was Jews in the News which was focusing more on the content creating aspect of the iPad technology.  Students would access a webquest for the instructions on their task to create a newscast each class about a current event item in Israel or an issue that effects Jewish people.  By using articles found on the internet they would produce a newscast using Tellagmi, iMovie or the green screen application.  The newscasts would be shared on the Temple webpage.

The second course focused on technology as a way of presenting and organizing class materials.  Using Jews on television to explore stereotypes of Jews, students would view select television episodes and through class discussion look for the different ways in which Jews are portrayed.  The introductory lesson, which is linked below, provides several short YouTube clips of some of the shows we would view. Students would be asked to use those clips to brainstorm some of the stereotypes that we might be exploring.

Introductory Lesson Prezi - still in progress but a GREAT start!

During each class discussion we would take notes using Popplet so that at the end of the seven-week course we would have a web of all the sterotryes discussed and examples from more than one television show for each.

Using technology to plan out the courses was in some ways easier than I had expected.  Creating a Prezi was more challenging than I had anticipated and it took me at least 3 tries to be satisfied with what I had created. This could be due to my status as a novice Prezi user.  Its a good thing I have a few more months before class starts to make improvements!